Thursday, June 26, 2008

Being a good SEO sometimes means you have to present the raw data of your research to your client, even when that data is apparently utterly ridiculous. One such recent situation has come up while researching the Google search term “Computer Service”. Our research tools report that the number 2 and 3 most popular regions for this search are Louisiana and Iowa. Now this of course this matches no practical experience the customer has seen in real life.

The real life experience the customer reports more closely matches the data we see for the individual cities where the search term most often originates from.

This then begs the question do you ignore valid generalized marketing data that you cannot verify in the real world or do you trust your source and devote some resources to the market in hopes of capturing some potential revenue that is of yet unrealized?

In this case we will urge the customer to approach and answer this question from several angels. First we recommend that they increase their efforts to build links and traffic to the landing page for the generalized search for Iowa and Louisiana, at the same time we believe that within that general area, that specific pages targeting the product within the city should be developed or strengthened.

Also, it goes without saying that main focus of this effort should be spent on the specific cities that turn up as the most common originating location for the search term. Which luckily as we mentioned earlier were the more common large cities that already derive a good deal of traffic from search terms such as “San Antonio Computer Service”, “Austin Computer Service” or “Dallas Computer Service”. Ok three of the top 5 cities are in Texas but that we can believe.